Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista

Posted by timothy on from the such-small-portions dept.

MojoKid writes Buried in the details of Microsoft's technical preview for Windows 10 is a bit of a footnote concerning the operating system's requirements. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1, which had the same requirements as Windows 8, which stuck to Windows 7 specs, which was the same as Windows Vista. At this point, it's something we take for granted with future Windows release. As the years roll by, you can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM. The average smartphone is more powerful than this these days. For decades, the standard argument has been that Microsoft had to continue supporting ancient operating systems and old configurations, ignoring the fact that the company did its most cutting-edge work when it was willing to kill off its previous products in fairly short order. what would Windows look like if Microsoft at least mandated a dual-core product? What if DX10 — a feature set that virtually every video card today supports, according to Valve's Steam Hardware Survey, became the minimum standard, at least on the x86 side of the equation? How much better might the final product be if Microsoft put less effort into validating ancient hardware and kicked those specs upwards, just a notch or two? If Microsoft did raise the specs a notch or two with each release, I think there'd be some justified complaints about failing to leave well enough alone, at least on the low end.

10 of 554 comments (clear)

  1. Hardware isn't Progressing by Pikoro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the reason the specs aren't increasing much is because the pace of hardware improvements isn't moving as fast as it used to. Nowadays, you pick up an i7 and 16Gb of RAM, your favorite video card, toss an SSD in there and you've basically hit the limit.

    All we're getting these days is more cores as the whole gigahertz wars ended 10 years ago.

    --
    "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
    1. Re:Hardware isn't Progressing by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The main reason MS is holding on to old hardware is many businesses still have older hardware. They dread, perhaps unreasonably, any loss to linux or other competitors on this older hardware. We've seen in the past that Micorsoft will do anything to keep Linux from getting a foothold.

    2. Re:Hardware isn't Progressing by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Normally I'm not in the habit of praising Microsoft. However, the fact that they have been able to expand the capabilities of their OS as much as they have from where Vista was and still hold the line of system requirements is commendable. It certainly doesn't help drive new PC sales, but it's an impressive credit to their development teams.

      If you think about it, it's actually the inevitable consequence of trying (successfully) to shoehorn Windows onto ARM tablets and phones. Now that both the kernel and the huge chunk of userspace are identical on all three, this means it had to be optimized a lot for both perf and size. But while those optimizations were a necessity for tablets and especially phones, the desktop also benefits, and the "freeze" of the minimum specs is the user-visible consequence.

      (in practice, Win7 actually ran better than Vista on those minimal specs, and Win8.1 runs better still - again, a direct consequence of moving further towards the "one OS" goal)

  2. I don't think we are giving anything up. by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Windows is an operating system. It's job is to allow other applications to be executed simultaneously. All of the resources windows consumes are resources denied to other applications. I'm not saying that we need to be stingy like in the bad old days when programmers where more concerned about saving clock cycles than writing scalable, maintainable, and reusable code. But now that we are passed all that, there is no sense in wasting cycles frivolously. Let the applications do that.

  3. Lost opportunity? I doubt it by Cabriel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since when is having a light-weight OS a bad thing? Haven't people been harping on MS enough for having bloated OSes?

    Sure, make allowances for multiple-core and multiple CPUs on the not-so-low end, but making the minimum requirement a single CPU was definitely smart on their end.

    1. Re:Lost opportunity? I doubt it by BluenoseJake · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Windows 7 is faster than Vista on the same hardware. It was written to run on Netbooks, which Vista could not have run on. Win 8/8.1 is faster still. It's you who are being dishonest or lazy by claiming otherwise, there is lots of evidence to bear this out, you just refuse to find it or test for yourself.

  4. It's the operating system being efficient. by Rakarra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're not really "giving up" anything. You don't turn on the computer to play Operating System. You do it to run applications. So Windows requires a low overhead? Well that's great, an operating system SHOULD have a low overhead because it's supposed to get out of the way, not use resources. Your computer is a zero-sum game, memory and CPU that is taken by the OS is usually unavailable to your apps, the things that are actually important (barring, of course, apps that don't multi-thread and can only use part of the CPU, etc).

    I suppose we have this fantasy of rotating windows, whiz-bang effects, SFX on the window borders on the desktop.. what do you really get from that? Anything beyond saying "oh that's cool" when you see a demo on the store shelf or a flashy yet impractical interface on a TV show? I know what I got from that -- an annoyance with Gnome 3, GPU memory reserved by the f*%^ing interface, and a lot of time spent figuring out how to turn that nonsense off (thank God Gnome's extensions make that easier to do that now than it was a few years ago!).

    Maybe a simpler interface is better. Maybe an interface that doesn't try to do too much visually results in a more USABLE experience. More bells and whistles are not better.

  5. Re:Buy a Mac by rafjaimes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think you misunderstood Ron024's comment, or maybe I did. He is saying newer versions of OSX are NOT compatible with older machines. You can get mostly any linux distro to run on any computer since like a Pentium 2 (dependent on DE/WM).

  6. tell my 2008 Mac . latest for $35 by raymorris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Somebody forgot to tell my Mac that, because more than six years after purchase it's still running the latest OS. I just ran an update this morning, in fact. I think we spent $35 on an upgrade once.

  7. Re:WfW in VM by Mr_Wisenheimer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    16 bit applications were just an example. DOS is pretty much free as is Microsoft's visualization environment if you run 64-bit windows. There still are quite a few legacy 16 bit DOS applications out there, btw. You pay millions of dollars to code a solution back in the 1980's or 1990's and upgrading the software is not always the best option. Heck, there is still a lot of legacy code out there from before the introduction of the MS-DOS PC in the early 80's.

    The point is, MS cares a lot about compatibility. A lot of times, "run in XP mode" is good enough to get most problems fixed and 64 bit windows supports compatibility modes going all the way back to the first 32 bit OS, which is Windows 95.

    While a program written for Windows 10 probably won't run on Windows 95, a business program written for Windows 95 probably will run on Windows 10, and corporations care a lot about that compatibility.